marked in one way
or another, perhaps. I should have said you were an artist, if I hadn't
known it.'

'Why? Does my hair want cutting?'

'Oh, no! It's only that you look at things and people as I've
seen artists do, with an eye that moves steadily from detail to
detail--rather looking them over than looking at them.'

The boy came up panting. 'Telegram for you, sir,' he said to Trent.
'Just come, sir.'

Trent tore open the envelope with an apology, and his eyes lighted up
so visibly as he read the slip that Marlowe's tired face softened in a
smile.

'It must be good news,' he murmured half to himself.

Trent turned on him a glance in which nothing could be read. 'Not
exactly news,' he said. 'It only tells me that another little guess of
mine was a good one.'

CHAPTER VIII: The Inquest

The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as
a provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of
his work, and the news of Manderson's mysterious death within his
jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A respectable
capacity for marshalling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of
impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands, and sometimes
disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.

The court was held in a long, unfurnished room lately built on to the
hotel, and intended to serve as a ballroom or concert-hall. A regiment
of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to
be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
knew Trent by sight assured the rest that he was not in the court.

The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
called, from whom the coroner, after some enquiry into the health and
circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs Manderson was
taken through her evidence by the coroner with the s